41–45 of 45 posts
This is sad news, even more so since NYT is likely to be rated as junk by Moody's... There aren't many ways out of this kind of mess. http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN23458880200810...
Seems like something Google should actually buy for the content-making-people. Maybe there's just too much debt though, and they can just hire the people directly.
I doubt the people are worth that much. Staff journalists don't vary _that_ much in quality (though editorial standards do) and there's tons of fresh meat coming out of j-school every year. The most valuable asset that the New York Times has is its brand. Well, that and a big honking New York skyscraper.
I'm thinking along the lines of reporters who are funded for long enough to go to a foreign country, genuinely spend time understanding what's going on, and writing thoughtful, lengthy articles (that then of course get parroted all over). Is that largely the responsibility of the editorial staff at a newspaper?
I guess Google should get those people and maybe get them to throw in the logo. :)
I wonder how much their situation would improve by opening up their archive for free and removing the registration stuff? They'd get vastly more page views, and thus more ad revenue. For that matter, if they do go down, what happens to the archive? I hope that something like Wikimedia or the Internet Archive gets access to it, so all that information isn't lost forever.
Isn't the archive free already?
They should sell their presses and go to a Print on demand model. They could have special NYT dispensers at kiosks that allow you to choose which stories you want to read and makes a custom newspaper with ads targeted to match for each patron. Then over time it should learn each readers tastes and recommend stories. Google news for the unwired world. Vendors would rent the specialized printing machines from NYT for t…
Setting up those kiosks, even in New York City alone, would require a massive capital expenditure; the NYT company doesn't have the cash to spend, and this is not exactly the best time to raise investment for such a project. And a-la-carte pricing is actually bad for newspaper profits. First of all, if the customer has to look at each headline and think, "do I want to spend another penny for this story?", the custome…
iTunes makes money by unpackaging songs and selling alcarte why not news?
The POD device could offer other printed materials as well and you could sell it to the news stands as a way to avoid buying a bunch of inventory that is going to go stale in 1 to 30 days anyways.
What that article is really saying is that you could charge more for a customized paper even if it had less content and people wouldn't care.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about this - fire everyone but the writers and a couple of great managers, sell all of the office space. Meet at Starbucks, if you need to, and organize everything over e-mail.
Do you know what those other 11,615 employees do? I don't, and this is just a stab in the dark, but I'm thinking you're as clueless as I am. I don't know how such an absurd statement gets modded up on a site like HN that tends to be geared for the entrepreneur types. How exactly would firing 97% of the workforce help turn things around? Let's say you've got 350 writers and a couple great managers. Nevermind what your…